


this is the fate you've carved on me

by simplyprologue



Series: who said this must be all or nothing? [1]
Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Angst, Everything Hurts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Roman Is Here In Spirit, Seth Does Some Light Stalking, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-28 21:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16250111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Dean loves them. Dean is leaving them. He’s not leaving them “regardless” or “despite” or some other qualifier or adverb or preposition, because whatever is going on in Dean’s head is bigger than what’s going on in his heart, and Seth knows all about thinking yourself out of a good thing which is apparently what Dean dedicated the twenty hour flight from Melbourne to Chicago to doing.Set after the 10/8/2018 episode of RAW.





	this is the fate you've carved on me

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Because it's not a heel turn, it's mental illness. Title is taken from "Gravity," by Vienna Teng. Set after the 10/8/2018 episode of RAW.

There’s nothing Dean can do to him that he hasn’t already done. Nothing that Dean can do that Seth hasn’t already done to himself. It would be a comfort, truly, if Dean would just haul off and punch him, scream in his face, take his title from him. It would break him, but in a way that was familiar, comfortable, even if it was no longer a hurt that was in a way, self-inflicted.

It was easier to stomach Dean’s retaliation instead of this recoiling silence, the thrilling high of bloodsport to this quiet, withdrawing low.

Seth would classify his emotions as having settled at a low grade panic. If they were a hurricane, they would be a Category One at landfall. A sustainable anxiety, borne from his and Roman’s confusion watching Dean turn his back and leave them in the ring at the end of RAW.

If he was younger, he would have allowed the panic to boil and bubble into rage. A full Category Five disaster human.

That’s not who he is anymore.

And he doesn’t know who Dean is anymore.

Seth grips the steering wheel of his rental, switching from two hands at ten-and-two to one hand on six. It doesn’t hurt, he tells himself, except it does. It doesn’t scare him, except it does. He would be less scared, maybe, or more - this kind of emotional calculus remains one of Seth’s weaker skills in a year of #AllHeart - if he wasn’t so certain that Dean loved him, loved Roman. If he didn’t know that Dean would never betray them, that he would never leave them with their faces in the canvas of the ring after taking a beating from a steel chair.

Dean loves them. Dean is leaving them. He’s not leaving them “regardless” or “despite” or some other qualifier or adverb or preposition, because whatever is going on in Dean’s head is bigger than what’s going on in his heart, and Seth knows all about thinking yourself out of a good thing which is apparently what Dean dedicated the twenty hour flight from Melbourne to Chicago to doing.

(It would be astonishing, if Hunter’s proposal for Seth to betray the Shield hadn’t taken only one sleepless night to land.

But hey, Seth Rollins _is_ the Architect.

He does the same stupid shit as Dean, just sometimes more pragmatically, and therefore often times with more speed.)

His phone vibrates in his lap, he flickers his eyes to the car radio, and he sighs - he’s been driving for almost five hours without a break since he set out from Chicago that afternoon. He needs to pull over, get something to eat, get a cup of shitty coffee, stretch his legs. (He thinks of Dean and his stupid compression socks, which aren’t stupid at all, because a MRSA infection will find so many ways to try to kill you.) Needs to text Roman back. Needs to not go straight from the car to confronting Dean.

Seth follows the signs bright, well-lit place advertising a few 24-hour fast food franchises a few more miles down the highway and finally gives his phone more than a cursory glance as he gets out of the compact rental car, wincing.

Ro 10:02 PM:  
You there yet? 

Seth 10:24 PM:   
Ten miles out   
probably another 20 min idk local speed limits  
probably 25 mph

Ro 10:31 PM:  
you check his card 

Seth 10:32 PM:  
Not in the last hour or so 

They’d given Dean twelve hours to return their voicemails and texts, or at least swagger into one of their hotel rooms with a grease-stained McDonalds bag and no apology, pretending that he hadn’t scared the shit out of them. Pretending everything was fine. That clock ran out around noon, and it was another few hours of debate of whether it was worth one (Seth, really) of them flying to Vegas on the off chance Dean actually went home (which they doubted, it was too obvious) and then another few hours later when Roman had to absolutely leave to make his flight for a press appearance when Seth ventured, finally, that he could... most likely get into Dean’s online banking information… since he was the one who set it up, back in 2012.

When Dean needed to open an account for direct deposit.

Because Dean was no longer working for twenty dollars cash, a leftover hot dog, and a handshake.

And if Seth was right, Dean never changed the username or password.

Seth _was_ right (because he’s the Architect) and that is why he was (prior to pulling off for the rest stop) hurtling (as so much as one can hurtle while obeying speed limits, a trait that Dean often lacks) towards a motel in Dumbfuck, Indiana. Seth leans against the car, sipping an abysmal excuse for an Americano as he ignores his thundering heart, and opens the banking app.

The only recent activity is at a liquor store and a 7-Eleven.

While this is not a startling revelation of Dean’s late night purchasing habits, Seth truly hopes he isn’t about to come into contact with the Red Bull and vodka version of the man.

Seth 10:38 PM:   
$42.32 at liquor store, $12.78 at 7-11  
still in the same town

Ro 10:41 PM:  
Bottle of jack, two liters of coke, and donuts 

Whiskey makes Dean maudlin, but again Seth’s emotional calculus fails him on deriving if maudlin is better or worse than energy-drink-and-clear-liquor belligerent or if the kind of alcohol he’s drinking even matters at this point.

Seth 10:43 PM:  
I’m not gonna bet against u on that  
getting back on the highway now  
text you when i get there i guess

Ro 10:45 PM  
good luck uce  
keep me updated

It’s as shitty a motel as it looked on Google Maps, and exactly the kind of place that Ambrose would choose to hide out in for a couple of days. Seth wagers it’s exactly the kind of shitty and half-assedly run that if he pressed, he could find out the room Dean is staying in but his willingness to stomp on Dean’s boundaries for ostensibly his own safety has its limits, and those limits are fraudulently gaining access to a motel room and running afoul of privacy regulations.

Also, there’s a sign on the door to the front office stating it's closed from 9 PM to 7 AM.

Seth decides to sit in the parking lot instead and hope Dean comes outside.

And sends him one last text for good measure.

Seth 11:18 PM   
send up a flare, asshole   
we care that you’re not dead

 

* * *

 

Around one in the morning Seth begins to truly ruminate on how creepy it is to be sitting, reclined in the driver's seat of a black rental car, in the parking lot of the motel where your friend who isn’t answering your phone calls is staying, a fact which you only know because you mild-to-moderately broke into his bank information. He tries to assure himself that this is on par with at least several events in his and Dean’s storied relationship, but can only find comparable events during the period of their relationship where they were actively trying to kill each other.

This is not that, but Seth still cringes.

He supposes they did what they did back then out of love, too.

(That doesn’t help.)

The music he’s playing on his phone would be classed by Dean as “emo bullshit,” in a time before Dean wore skinny jeans, another thing which Seth knows nothing about because honestly, when in the _fuck_ did Dean start wearing tight pants?

 

* * *

 

Here is a fact of the universe: Dean Ambrose will always come for Seth Rollins, as assuredly as Seth Rollins will always come for Dean Ambrose.

Corollary: Dean Ambrose, with a bottle in one fist, slams the other down on the hood of Seth’s car while he dozes some time around 3 AM. He jerks awake, an earbud falling down onto the shoulder of his hoodie. For moment he’s in the thrall of complete disorientation, prepared to have to beat the shit out of the man on the other side of the windshield until the glare of the streetlight halo around his head recedes to reveal a head of familiar ginger hair and shadowed, heavily lidded eyes.

His heart skitters sideways, pulse skyrocketing.

Tense, Seth shoves the car keys into the front pocket of his sweatshirt along with his wallet and phone, and steps out of the car.

“Found me,” Dean mumbles, taking swig from the bottle, cavalier.

Well, trying to be. Trying to be brave, be bold. Trying to be drunk, trying to be that familiar kind of off-kilter, trying to be the right kind of desperate wrong.

“Yeah,” Seth says softly. “Found you.”

“You - what? Put a GPS tracker on my phone or something?”

“Or something.”

He wants to believe he didn’t come here to instigate, but Seth’s not sure how to get a response from Dean falling back on that, his oldest of tricks. He used to be able to raise Dean’s ire and soothe it, it used to be entirely under his control. At the moment, it seems like showing up here, in this random town out in the sticks, is enough to make Dean mad and so Seth doesn’t mention anything about Dean’s bank account in case he needs to use it again to track him down and just lets him find his way to angry on his own.

“You real proud of yourself, then? That you got to be,” he stutters, tripping over his words, “got to be the Architect? Save me? Find the screw up and make sure he’s not doing something to ruin the Shield reunion?”

“Roman and I were real worried, man. That’s all.” Seth shoves his hands into his pockets. “We come for each other, you know that’s what we do - what we try to do.”

 _Try to do._ He hedges. He has to hedge now.

With that, Dean’s posture dissolves from bellicose intoxication to a weary slump.

“Well. Don’t be.” The words are short coming out of his mouth. Measured, in a way Dean rarely, if ever, is. Seth watches at Dean lifts the bottle of Jack to his lips again, his eyes transfixed on the lines of his neck as he swallows once, twice, three times before he takes off, moving more quickly than Seth anticipated he’d be able to.

“Where are you going?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know the answer. His room.

(Hopefully.

So he might not, he thinks. He’s seen Dean in a lot of moods.

Just not this one.)

“Back to my room,” he mumbles, looping around the back of one of the wings of the motel, towards a flight of stairs. “I’m done now. You saw me. You can feel better now, tell Roman he’s off the hook too.”

Seth knows he’s not being invited to follow, but does anyway.

“I don’t _feel better_ Dean,” he spits out, irritated and frustrated and not angry at Dean, but also angry at Dean, and he hates it. He hates all of it, that Dean feels this low when he is so close to the top, when they’re main eventing shows and Seth knows if he called Kurt Angle now and begged in just the right away, they could have another shot at the tag titles and the Shield would have _everything._

Except none of it matters. Not the titles, not the glory.

None of it matters and none of what he does matters. But Dean - Dean matters. Dean has always mattered. Regardless ( _despite, prepositions, adverbs_ ) of what Seth has told a crowd, a McMahon, or himself, Dean has always mattered more.

“Great! Now fuck off,” he says, voice manic as he takes the steps two at a time.

Seth follows him up, heart pounding in time with his steps. He’s not sure if his pulse will ever slow, not so long as…

He’s starting to feel lightheaded.

He’s never dealt with a Dean like this. And he asked Roman ( _when I was - you know - did he ever get like this then?_ ) if he had ( _no, never_ ) and so when he’s five feet from Ambrose, close enough to tackle or punch or put in a headlock, hug or kiss or box his ears, he has no goddamn clue how to reach him. He doesn’t think Dean’s reckless enough to hurt himself ( _tonight,_ a cruel voice whispers) but… Seth doesn’t want him to hurt at all.

It’s not a realistic goal.

Seth doesn’t know what his goal is in coming here.

“Leave me alone,” Dean says, exhaling in a way that it seems like he’s emptying himself entirely.

“What do you - do you want a fight? Wanna push me away? Go right ahead, pick a fight. Yell all you want. Hit me, dammit.” Seth’s voice approximates a growl in the pale fluorescent light illuminating the corridor.

He doesn’t want to raise his voice.

Dean shakes his head, turning his back on him again. “No.”

“Why not?” Seth does lunge for him then, grabbing his arm, trying to turn him back around. “Dean. Dean!”

“I’m not gonna make you feel better.” He wrenches himself out of Seth’s grasp. “You think I don’t know by now you’ll just still be standin’ there, looking like you do? I know you, Seth. Don’t save me every time.”

Seth stops short.

(Here is a fact of the universe.)

“Why are you—”

Dean keeps walking, past rooms 216, 217, 218. The back of the motel faces the woods, the trees dampening the noise coming off the highway. He slides a key card out of his back pocket, jamming it into the electronic reader on the door handle. “I don’t know. I’m not doing this.”

“Dean, I love you. You know I love you.” Seth has to run a little to catch the closing door with his foot. “What are you—”

He barks a laugh, dropping the bottle down on the counter outside the bathroom with a clatter and stalking towards the bed, flinging himself down onto it like his own gauntlet. It’s apt enough, considering.

The cheap mattress squeals in protest.

“Ya gonna follow me into my room? We still have that kinda relationship, Rollins?”

 _Still._ Seth chooses not to address that.

“Well I followed you all the way here - wherever here is - so I might as well, right?” He closes the door softly behind him and does up the chain.

“Funny,” Dean sneers. “I’m not gonna give you what you want.”

“What do I want, huh?”

Dean must have left the bathroom light on when he left - for what, Seth still doesn’t know, Dean’s room doesn’t face the parking lot his car is in and he doesn’t appear to have left his room for any particular reason to stumble across his vehicle. (Maybe Dean knew he would come, somehow, Seth thinks. And then stops thinking. It’s dumb.) The harsh light of the bathroom overhead and a sliver of light streaming in from a gap in the curtains provides little illumination, but Seth doesn’t move to the lightswitch. A wedge of grey slides across Dean’s face, capturing it in a snarl.

Seth looks away, hastily counting the empty bottles lined up next to the sink.

Two six packs.

He’s been drinking all day, and only just decided to switch to something stronger.

“Go home Seth,” Dean says, drawing his gaze again. His voice rumbles deep from his chest, flat and lacking intonation. “Go literally anywhere else but here.”

If this is where nine months of letting Dean take the lead on their communication has landed them, then Seth thinks - no, he will not. His steps into the room are more tentative than he’d like, as if he could startle Dean away even as he watches every of his soft and slow foot falls. Seth drops the few things he carried in with him on the dresser, and then sits on the edge of the bed, back to Dean.

“You’re not alone. You were never alone,” he says slowly, voice a livewire pulsating with anger and love and a high voltage of fear. All of the things that have kept him away since Monday night. His chest is an electric storm, waiting to break. “I woke up to a text message that you sent in the middle of night. _I love you._ That was it. That’s how you told me you were dying. I didn’t know - we would have come, we would have done anything—”

“You were busy. You were both _busy._ ” Dean spits out. “Monday Night Rollins. All Heart. It was cute, it really was, I was really happy for ya. You don’t _need me_ now.”

“You stopped picking up the phone, Dean.” Seth places his hand on the rumpled covers, sliding his palm over white poly-cotton blend until his fingertips almost, and only almost, reach Dean’s. “Don’t bullshit me. And okay, Ro and I should have pushed harder. We should have visited more. That’s on us. We were busy. But we weren’t too busy, if you had just _said—_ ”

Seth has always known about the two Deans.

Everyone does, everyone in the locker room and everyone at the office, their friends and the fans.

There’s the goofy Uncle Deano, the man who happily dons stupid costumes and quips one liners, who dances in the ring and gets a plant cheered by the crowd. Then there’s the Lunatic Fringe, an open wound of a man bleeding vengeance and violence who roars and stalks and goes for the jugular, who will take any amount of pain without breaking. Both men sell merchandise, both men are beloved, both men have climbed to the top of the WWE universe. Both will never, ever, give up until they are dead.

The two Ambroses.

Flip the switch for funny or for murder.

And now here’s a third Dean Ambrose - done, defeated, and running scared. The one who _did_ almost die, alone on his back in a hospital room, getting pumped full of antibiotics and pain meds and sedatives. The one that needs help. Not to win a match, or beat a rival.

This is Dean who just… needs help.

The third face of instability, the one that can’t be laughed at or glorified or written off. The one that doesn’t hold a title, or chase a dream or the thrill of the crowd losing their minds with him.

When Seth chances a glance down at Dean’s face, it is as it has been lately.

Inscrutable.

“You know what? You’re right. Roman and I, we don’t need you,” Seth says, careful and calculating and cold - it’s all bullshit and his blood feels like it's on fire. “None of us need each other anymore. We have nothing left to prove. When we hit the scene six years I was the head, Roman was the hands, and you were the heart. We needed each other to be complete. So much as happened since then. We’ve done almost everything there is to do. We’ve learned a lot, fucked up a lot, become a lot of different things from the guys that we were. We don’t need each other.”

It would take a lot, Seth thinks, for them to need each other. They know what it is to lose everything, pick themselves back up, and continue. To be wounded, and to continue. But, Seth figures, he and Roman do not know what means to die and come back as something else.

Ever so slowly, like a master moving a piece across a chessboard, he touches his fingers to Dean’s.

“But I want you. I’ll always want you. And I’ll always choose you. You’re my family.”

From here to the end of the line.

Dean Ambrose has earned, for better or worse, his eternal devotion.

“What if _I_ don’t want _you?”_ Dean asks with a glassy countenance. Seth wonders what mosaics they could make with the glazed masks they’ve worn between them, were they all thrown to the ground and shattered.

“Then I’ll wait. I know what my heart wants, now. We’re family, united or divided.” A lesson that Dean taught him through blood and betrayal and redemption and forgiveness: this does not end. He strokes his fingers in the hollows of the other man’s knuckles. Mustering as much tenderness that he’s capable of, he asks, “Where is your head at, Dean?”

“I don’t know.” Without warning, Dean sits up, pulling his hand away and into his lap. “I need to be alone.”

“Okay.”

Seth nods, combs his fingers through his hair to needlessly neaten his bun, and stands.

Okay.

This is fine.

“What you’re gonna just fuckin’—” Dean starts, tempering flaring, voice cracking and then choking off entirely.

Seth stares down at him in the darkness, and sighs. Framing Dean’s face in his hands, he stoops, bringing their mouths together. It’s quick, and gentle, more an exchange of breath or a soft punctuation of an unspoken statement or a bandage to ease a wound. He breaks the kiss almost immediately, leaning their foreheads together. “Where is your head at?”

Like a crack of lightning, Dean breaks, and Seth is almost relieved. He’s seen Dean cry before, weep in the ring in front of a crowd of thousands, sob in frustration after a match.

Sitting back down on the bed, he wraps his arms around Dean, pulling his head to rest in the vulnerable place where throat meets collarbone, where teeth can so easily bite down and tear. Dean snivels, and weeps, and it’s wholly unattractive and uncomfortable and definitely awful and Seth somehow feels both joy and despair as he cards his fingers through Dean’s short hair.

It’s the dark mirror of the end of their match at Super Show-Down, Dean picking up him and Roman to help them to the back. Seth remembers the weight of the belts in his arms, the way his body began to give out as he leaned against the apron, smiling breathlessly at him.

Dean, wrapping his arms around his head and pulled him to this chest. Dean, kissing the top of his head.

Triumphant. Content. Assured.

He’s none of those things tonight.

“There’s nothing you can do to me that I won’t survive. There’s nothing that we haven’t already done to each other,” he says, voice not quite a murmur, his lips next to Dean’s ear. There’s no need to be quiet, there’s no one here to interrupt but… there’s a need for it. The quiet, the closeness. “Except… except stop. I don’t want that. I can live with it, I can try, if it’s what _you_ want. We... we don’t need to talk about it, right now. We don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to. But you’re scaring us again.”

Dean grips his shoulder tight, anchoring them to each other and the bed.

“I’m sorry.”

“We don’t say that to each other,” Seth scoffs. It’s half a joke, half not.

He’s scrambling for what to say without Making It Worse, hoping he can piece together the Comforting words, not the ones that will make Dean Worse.  

“Shut the fuck up, Rollins,” he bites out, but there’s little venom in it.

Seth pets his hair, the side of his face, runs the backs of his fingers to trace the stern line of his jaw. There’s a lot they aren’t certain they are tonight, in contrast to the things they usually know that they are. The things they can usually depend on being, for themselves and for each other. But they still have some things. Seth thinks some things will always remain. If six years have taught him anything, it’s that.

“I’ll always come for you. That’s what we do. But you gotta let me know where you are.”

“I’m fine.”

Dean sniffles a disgusting amount of snot that Seth does not wish to consider ending up on the shoulder of his hoodie. But it’s fine. Tonight, things that aren’t fine are fine.

“If it helps to say that, sure,” he says, and feels Dean shift against him. Not away, entirely, but but closer either. Restlessly. “Do you want me to go?” He stops the movement of his hand, looking down. “Dean?”

Dean lifts his head away from cloying moisture trap he’s made for himself between his face and Seth’s chest, takes a deep breath, and then rests his forehead against Seth’s cheek. “I’m not trying to—”

Seth strokes the side of Dean’s face.

“I know.”

He does not have a goddamn clue. All Seth really knows tonight is that he’s made himself feel better - Dean wasn’t wrong. His motivations in tracking him here were not wholly unselfish. He was afraid before, and now - he still is, but less so. It can be managed, now that he’s with him.

Dean sits up, scrubbing his face with his hands. “It’s not that I don’t believe you—”

“I know,” Seth says, because he thinks that’s what he’s supposed to say. That there’s still trust. That he still knows who and what Dean is, even if Dean might not right now, when all he does know for certain is that he hopes Dean can’t feel his heart hammering against his ribs.

They’re just a little off-balance. They have been before. In their personal lives, in the ring. But it’s always come back. It’s been worse than this, for them. But it hasn’t been worse than this, for him. He’s thirty-one years old, and Seth realizes he may finally have to learn some goddamn patience.

And Dean needs…

Here is a fact of the universe: Seth Rollins loves Dean Ambrose like a scar upon his flesh.

“I almost died. And then—”

“You lived.”

“Yeah.” Dean nods jerkily, meeting Seth’s eyes. “I came back, right?”

Shoulders folding in, he crumples. His breath comes in ragged gasps, and Seth folds himself around him once more.

 

* * *

 

What happens next is this: Seth coaxes Dean into taking a shower for the first time in days. A real shower, with soap and shampoo and maybe a washcloth. And while Dean showers, he collects all the empty bottles and the alarmingly small amount of evidence of consumed food (a half eaten box of cinnamon donuts and a crumpled chip bag) into a grocery bag, and takes out it to the dumpster behind the motel, careful to snag the key card from the pile of Dean’s clothes before going outside.

He looks at his phone for the first time in hours. Nothing from Roman - Seth hopes he’s asleep, with the kind of day he has ahead of him. Face of the brand.

One of them, at least, should sleep.

Seth 4:12 AM:  
i found him 

Then he turns it on silent, pockets it, and walks to the front of the motel to grab his luggage from the car. There’s a house show on Friday. He’ll have to figure out how to get them there. That is a problem for later.

When Seth walks back into the room Dean’s still in the shower, and Seth hesitates, wanting to check on him. He presses his ear to the door, and hears the sound of water hitting skin, the shower curtain, the bottom of cheap plastic tub. Not much more. He steps away from the door and lingers at the sink, brushing his teeth and splashing water on his face before stripping down himself to his underwear.

Gets into bed.

Does the math.

He has slept four out of the last thirty-six hours. If he’s calling it right, he’s not sleeping tonight either.

But he does begin to drift, even if his body is still too wired for real, restful sleep, and wakes again when Dean slides into bed without a stitch of clothing on, either too tired or too drunk to get dressed. Seth guesses he was never really drunk to begin with, and that Dean is exhausted in every way right now. And has been for at least a few weeks. Dean Ambrose survives harder than any other man he knows. His head is a mess on a good day.

His heart almost gave out in March.

“You gonna be able to sleep?” he asks him.

“Dunno,” Dean rasps. “Haven’t really been able to, recently. Didn’t at all on the flight.”

He does though, eventually, and as the night moves into the twilight hour, Seth finally feels his heart rate slow, and calm.

 

* * *

 

Ro 5:31 AM:  
you with deano?  
he okay?

Seth 5:33 AM:  
yes.  
no. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always appreciated.


End file.
